FUNDAMENTALS OF RELIGION

(This incomplete article was found in
the papers of Miss S. E. Waldo. The heading is inserted by us — Publisher.)

My mind can best grasp the religions of the world, ancient or
modern, dead or living, through this fourfold division:

1. Symbology — The employment of various
external aids to preserve and develop the religious faculty of man.

2. History — The philosophy of each
religion as illustrated in the lives of divine or human teachers
acknowledged by each religion. This includes mythology; for what is
mythology to one race, or period, is or was history to other races or
periods. Even in cases of human teachers, much of their history is
taken as mythology by successive generations.

3. Philosophy — The rationale of the whole
scope of each religion.

4. Mysticism — The assertion of something
superior to sense-knowledge and reason which particular persons, or all
persons under certain circumstances, possess; runs through the other
divisions also.

All the religions of the world, past or present, embrace one
or more of these principles, the highly developed ones having all the
four.

Of these highly developed religions again, some had no sacred
book or books and they have disappeared; but those which were based on
sacred books are living to the present day. As such, all the great
religions of the world today are founded on sacred books.

The Vedic on the Vedas (misnamed the Hindu or Brahminic).

The Avestic on the Avesta.

The Mosaic on the Old Testament.

The Buddhistic on the Tripitaka.

The Christian on the New Testament.

The Mohammedan on the Koran.

The Taoists and the Confucianists in China, having also books,
are so inextricably mixed up with the Buddhistic form of religion as to
be catalogued with Buddhism.

Again, although strictly speaking there are no absolutely
racial religions, yet it may be said that, of this group, the Vedic,
the Mosaic, and the Avestic religions are confined to the races to
which they originally belonged; while the Buddhistic, the Christian,
and the Mohammedan religions have been from their very beginning
spreading religions.

The struggle will be between the Buddhists and Christians and
Mohammedans to conquer the world, and the racial religions also will
have unavoidably to join in the struggle. Each one of these religions,
racial or spreading, has been already split into various branches and
has undergone vast changes consciously or unconsciously to adapt itself
to varying circumstances. This very fact shows that not one of them is
fitted alone to be the religion of the entire human race. Each religion
being the effect of certain peculiarities of the race it sprang from,
and being in turn the cause of the intensification and preservation of
those very peculiarities, not one of them can fit the universal human
nature. Not only so, but there is a negative element in each. Each one
helps the growth of a certain part of human nature, but represses
everything else which the race from which it sprang had not. Thus one
religion to become universal would be dangerous and degenerating to
man.

Now the history of the world shows that these two dreams —
that of a universal political Empire and that of a universal religious
Empire — have been long before mankind, but that again and again the
plans of the greatest conquerors had been frustrated by the splitting
up of his territories before he could conquer only a little part of the
earth; and similarly every religion has been split into sects before it
was fairly out of its cradle.

Yet it seems to be true, that the solidarity of the human
race, social as well as religious, with a scope for infinite variation,
is the plan of nature; and if the line of least resistance is the true
line of action, it seems to me that this splitting up of each religion
into sects is the preservation of religion by frustrating the tendency
to rigid sameness, as well as the dear indication to us of the line of
procedure.

The end seems, therefore, to be not destruction but a
multiplication of sects until each individual is a sect unto himself.
Again a background of unity will come by the fusion of all the existing
religions into one grand philosophy. In the mythologies or the
ceremonials there never will be unity, because we differ more in the
concrete than in the abstract. Even while admitting the same principle,
men will differ as to the greatness of each of his ideal teacher.

So, by this fusion will be found out a union of philosophy as
the basis of union, leaving each at liberty to choose his teacher or
his form as illustrations of that unity. This fusion is what is
naturally going on for thousands of years; only, by mutual antagonism,
it has been woefully held back.

Instead of antagonising, therefore, we must help all such
interchange of ideas between different races, by sending teachers to
each other, so as to educate humanity in all the various religions of
the world; but we must insist as the great Buddhist Emperor of India,
Asoka, did, in the second
century before Christ, not to abuse others, or to try to make a living
out of others' faults; but to help, to sympathise, and to enlighten.

There is a great outcry going over the world against
metaphysical knowledge as opposed to what is styled physical knowledge.
This crusade against the metaphysical and the beyond-this-life, to
establish the present life and the present world on a firmer basis, is
fast becoming a fashion to which even the preachers of religion one
after the other are fast succumbing. Of course, the unthinking
multitude are always following things which present to them a pleasing
surface; but when those who ought to know better, follow unmeaning
fashions, pseudo-philosophical though they profess to be, it becomes a
mournful fact.

Now, no one denies that our senses, as long as they are
normal, are the most trustworthy guides we have, and the facts they
gather in for us form the very foundation of the structure of human
knowledge. But if they mean that all human knowledge is only
sense-perception and nothing but that, we deny it. If by physical
sciences are meant systems of knowledge which are entirely based and
built upon sense-perception, and nothing but that, we contend that such
a science never existed nor will ever exist. Nor will any system of
knowledge, built upon sense-perception alone, ever be a science.

Senses no doubt cull the materials of knowledge and find
similarities and dissimilarities; but there they have to stop. In the
first place the physical gatherings of facts are conditioned by certain
metaphysical conceptions, such as space and time. Secondly, grouping
facts, or generalisation, is impossible without some abstract notion as
the background. The higher the generalization, the more metaphysical is
the abstract background upon which the detached facts are arranged.
Now, such ideas as matter, force, mind, law, causation, time, and space
are the results of very high
abstractions, and nobody has ever sensed any one of them; in other
words, they are entirely metaphysical. Yet without these metaphysical
conceptions, no physical fact is possible to be understood. Thus a
certain motion becomes understood when it is referred to a force;
certain sensations, to matter; certain changes outside, to law; certain
changes in thought, to mind; certain order singly, to causation — and
joined to time, to law. Yet nobody has seen or even imagined matter or
force, law or causation, time or space.

It may be urged that these, as abstracted concepts do not
exist, and that these abstractions are nothing separate or separable
from the groups of which they are, so to say, only qualities.

Apart from the question whether abstractions are possible or
not, or whether there is something besides the generalized groups or
not, it is plain that these notions of matter or force, time or space,
causation, law, or mind, are held to be units abstracted and
independent (by themselves) of the groups, and that it is only when
they are thought of as such, they furnish themselves as explanations of
the facts in sense-perception. That is to say, apart from the validity
of these notions, we see two facts about them — first, they are
metaphysical; second, that only as metaphysical do they explain the
physical and not otherwise.

Whether the external conforms to the internal, or the internal
to the external, whether matter conforms to mind, or mind to matter,
whether the surroundings mould the mind, or the mind moulds the
circumstances, is old, old question, and is still today as new and
vigorous as it ever was. Apart from the question of precedence or
causation — without trying to solve the problem as to whether the mind
is the cause of matter or matter the cause of mind — it is evident that
whether the external was formed by the internal or not, it must conform
itself to the internal for us to
be able to know it. Supposing that the external world is the cause of
the internal, yet we shall of have to admit that the external world, as
cause of ours mind, is unknown and unknowable, because the mind can
only know that much or that view of the external or that view which
conforms to or is a reflection of its own nature. That which is its own
reflection could not have been its cause. Now that view of the whole
mass of existence, which is cut off by mind and known, certainly cannot
be the cause of mind, as its very existence is known in and through the
mind.

Thus it is impossible to deduce a mind from matter. Nay, it is
absurd. Because on the very face of it that portion of existence which
is bereft of the qualities of thought and life and endowed with the
quality of externality is called matter, and that portion which is
bereft of externality and endowed with the qualities of thought and
life is called mind. Now to prove matter from mind, or mind from
matter, is to deduce from each the very qualities we have taken away
from each; and, therefore, all the fight about the causality of mind or
matter is merely a word puzzle and nothing more. Again, throughout all
these controversies runs, as a rule, the fallacy of imparting different
meanings to the words mind and matter. If sometimes the word mind is
used as something opposed and external to matter, at others as
something which embraces both the mind and matter, i.e. of which both
the external and internal are parts on the materialistic side; the word
matter is sometimes used in is the restricted sense of something
external which we sense, and again it means something which is the
cause of all the phenomena both external and internal. The materialist
frightens the idealist by claiming to derive his mind from the elements
of the laboratory, while all the time he is struggling to express
something higher than all elements and atoms, something of which both
the external and the internal
phenomena are results, and which he terms matter. The idealist, on the
other hand, wants to derive all the elements and atoms of the
materialist from his own thought, even while catching glimpses of
something which is the cause of both mind and matter, and which he
oft-times calls God. That is to say, one party wants to explain the
whole universe by a portion of it which is external, the other by
another portion which is internal. Both of these attempts are
impossible. Mind and matter cannot explain each other. The only
explanation is to be sought for in something which will embrace both
matter and mind.

It may be argued that thought cannot exist without mind, for
supposing there was a time when there was no thought, matter, as we
know it, certainly could not have existed. On the other hand, it may be
said that knowledge being impossible without experience, and experience
presupposing the external world, the existence of mind, as we know it,
is impossible without the existence of matter.

Nor is it possible that either of them had a beginning.
Generalisation is the essence of knowledge. Generalisation is
impossible without a storage of similarities. Even the fact of
comparison is impossible without previous experience. Knowledge thus is
impossible without previous knowledge — and knowledge necessitating the
existence of both thought and matter, both of them are without
beginning.

Again generalization, the essence of sense-knowledge, is
impossible without something upon which the detached facts of
perception unite. The whole world of external perceptions requires
something upon which to unite in order to form a concept of the world,
as painting must have its canvas. If thought or mind be this canvas to
the external world, it, in its turn requires another. Mind being a
series of different feelings and willing — and
not a unit, requires something besides itself as its background of
unity. Here all analysis is bound to stop, for a real unity has been
found. The analysis of a compound cannot stop until an indivisible unit
has been reached. The fact that presents us with such a unity
for both thought and matter must necessarily be the last indivisible
basis of every phenomenon, for we cannot conceive any further analysis;
nor is any further analysis necessary, as this includes an analysis of
all our external and internal perceptions.

So far then, we see that a totality of mental and material
phenomena, and something beyond, upon which they
are both playing, are the results of our investigation.

Now this something beyond is not in sense-perception; it is a
logical necessity, and a feeling of its indefinable presence runs
through all our sense-perceptions. We see also that to this something
we are driven by the sheer necessity of being true to our reason and
generalising faculty.

It may be urged that there is no necessity whatsoever of
postulating any such substance or being beyond the mass of mental and
material phenomena. The totality of phenomena is all that we know or
can know, and it requires nothing beyond itself to explain itself. An
analysis beyond the senses is impossible, and the feeling of a
substance in which everything inheres is simply an illusion.

We see, that from the most ancient times, there has been these
two schools among thinkers. One party claims that the unavoidable
necessity of the human mind to form concepts and abstractions is the
natural guide to knowledge, and that it can stop nowhere until we have
transcended all phenomena and formed a concept which is absolute in all
directions, transcending time and space and causality. Now if this
ultimate concept is arrived at by analysing the whole phenomena of
thought and matter, step by
step, taking the cruder first and resolving it into a finer, and still
finer, until we arrive at something which stands as the solution of
everything else, it is obvious that everything else beyond this final
result is a momentary modification of itself, and as such, this final
result alone is real and everything else is but its shadow. The
reality, therefore, is not in the senses but beyond them.

On the other hand, the other party holds that the only reality
in the universe is what our senses bring to us, and although a sense of
something beyond hangs on to all our sense-perceptions, that is only a
trick of the mind, and therefore unreal.

Now a changing something can never be understood, without the
idea of something unchanging; and if it be said that that unchanging
something, to which the changing is referred, is also a changing
phenomenon only relatively unchanging, and is therefore to be referred
to something else, and so on, we say that however infinitely long this
series be, the very fact of our inability to understand a changeable
without an unchangeable forces us to postulate one as the background of
all the changeable. And no one has the right to take one part of a
whole as right and reject the other at will. If one takes the obverse
he must take the reverse of the same coin also, however he may dislike
it.

Again, with every movement, man asserts his freedom. From the
highest thinker to the most ignorant man everyone knows that he is
free. Now every man at the same time finds out with a little thinking
that every action of his had motives and conditions, and given those
motives and conditions his particular action can be as rigorously
deduced as any other fact in causation.

Here, again, the same difficulty occurs. Man's will is as
rigorously bound by the law of causation as the growth of any little
plant or the falling of a stone, and yet, through all this bondage runs
the indestructible idea of
freedom. Here also the totality side will declare that the idea of
freedom is an illusion and man is wholly a creature of necessity.

Now, on one hand, this denial of freedom as an illusion is no
explanation; on the other hand, why not say that the idea of necessity
or bondage or causation is an illusion of the ignorant? Any theory
which can fit itself to facts which it wants to explain, by first
cutting as many of them as prevents its fitting itself into them, is on
the face of it wrong. Therefore the only way left to us is to admit
first that the body is not free, neither is the will but that there
must be something beyond both the mind and body which is free and